How to get Mideast peace swinging

My father had an idea that I think might work to bring about peace in the Middle East. Well, sort of ... it would need a little tweaking, but the old man's idea had all the basics.

By ColumnCredit

capecodtimes.com

By ColumnCredit

Posted Feb. 16, 2014 at 2:17 AM

By ColumnCredit

Posted Feb. 16, 2014 at 2:17 AM

» Social News

My father had an idea that I think might work to bring about peace in the Middle East. Well, sort of ... it would need a little tweaking, but the old man's idea had all the basics.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been spending time in the Middle East in a well-intentioned effort to broker a peace agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. This is a conflict that has ancient roots. Jewish tradition teaches that the prophet Abraham lived around 1800 BCE. Jews also believe that when Yahweh (God) chose Abraham to lead the chosen people who would soon become the Israelites, he made three promises to him.

The Jewish Bible says that one of those promises was that the people of Abraham would be given a homeland. After God led Abraham into the land of Canaan (modern Israel), he said to him, "To your descendants I will give this land" (Genesis 12:7). When Moses was leading his people out of bondage in Egypt, God repeated the promise to Moses: "Then you shall know that I am the LORD your God who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and I will give it to you as a heritage" (Exodus, 6:2-8).

The same area of the world has been called "Palestine" for close to 3,000 years. The name was not used so extensively in modern times, but, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the name Palestine was the label used to describe the land here under the so-called "British Mandate for Palestine," an edict of the League of Nations (before there was a United Nations) in 1922.

So there you have it: the Israelis claiming the land as being theirs by divine edict, and the Palestinians claiming the land to be theirs for thousands of years, reinforced by the legal declaration of the world community in 1922. This brief description of a very old and complex conflict is a massive oversimplification, but you get the general idea.

So I was listening to a show on public radio last week. The topic being discussed was the efforts of John Kerry to bring peace to this conflict, a massively ambitious enterprise that has challenged the best efforts of some of the best diplomatic minds of the past 65 years. All have failed. But Kerry maintains his quixotic quest with the best wishes and hopes of a lot of people, including me.

There were a lot of theories being bandied back and forth on the radio about what the U.S. might do to persuade the Israelis and Palestinians to come to the peace table with a practical agenda that might lead to peace. One guy, I think he was a caller into the program, said that rather than taking the positive reward program of "carrot and stick" diplomacy, we should try to use a more negative approach by denying each side something that they want until they agreed to meet and honestly work to reach some accords. As I drove along in my truck listening to the radio show, that negative approach to bring out a positive result didn't make much sense to me. I felt that a more positive plan might be more effective. And that's when I thought about my father.

When I was a little boy, my father decided to erect a swing set in our backyard. My father knew a guy (everyone in Rhode Island "knows a guy"). So, one Saturday, a big truck pulled up in front of our little house in Providence, and two guys unloaded the pipe. The pipe was very large and heavy iron pipe with a diameter of five or six inches. The two pieces for the uprights on either side were maybe 12 feet long with one end threaded. The crosspiece for the top was about 10 feet long with both ends threaded, and had four holes drilled all the way through it. On the ground next to the pipe were two giant threaded elbows. My father and my uncle Johnny threaded the pipes together forming a big "U" with the unthreaded areas at the ends. They dug two 2-foot-deep holes, poured stone and concrete in the holes and set the ends into the ground, leveling the whole thing and leaving it overnight. The next day, they hung four chains from the holes in the top piece, attached a seat to each pair of chains, and we had the sturdiest swing set in New England.

A few weeks later, my sisters and I were bickering and arguing about the allocation of time on the swing set. My mother had opened the kitchen window more than once and told us to behave. The bickering continued. Then we heard the back door slam, and around the corner came my father. He was not smiling. In his hand he held a small padlock. He silently inserted the padlock through the chain on one swing, inserted it through a chain on the other swing, and clicked the lock shut, leaving the three of us standing there looking at our crippled and useless swing set, hanging awkwardly like a useless remnant of an accident of some kind. He turned to us. "When you can play peacefully with each other, come into the house, and we'll talk about it."

Ten minutes later, my father led us out the back door to the swing set. He wordlessly unlocked the padlock and then walked back into the house. After that, when we could feel a disagreement or an argument arising, we'd look toward the house and then stop and work it out among ourselves.

Maybe the caller to the talk show had the right idea about the negative approach to diplomacy in the Middle East. Hey, why not give it a try? It worked for my old man in his peacekeeping efforts.

Dan McCullough is a Cape Cod Times columnist. Contact him at www.danmccullough.com or write him, care of the Cape Cod Times, 319 Main St., Hyannis, MA 02601.